So
how’s all that modern environmentalism working out for us -- the green
living, the carbon credits, reduced consumption, development in the
Third World, better solar pan­els? If it all seems hopelessly
inadequate, even laughable in the face of today’s global ecological
crisis, perhaps that’s because it’s rooted in denial of the origins of
the ecological drama now playing out.

It’s
a drama of which climate change is only a part. It goes back ten
thousand years and farther into the human past, confronts us with how
we relate to nature, and brings reminders of abandoned civilizations.

We
turn away from this drama because it raises troubling questions going
straight to the foundations of our way of life. But grappling with
converging environmental crises and the specter of widespread
ecological collapse, for the sake of the human future it’s time we face
it. [1]

cess. Growing and storing food we could go on growing our food supply. The result has been predictable: more humans.

In
publications ranging from peer reviewed journal articles to novels,
analysts such as Russell Hopfenberg, David Pimentel, and Daniel Quinn
have described a continuous cycle of human population growth followed
by expanding agriculture to feed our growing numbers, followed in turn
by more population growth. [8] [9] In less than one percent of our
history our numbers shot from perhaps fve million to 6.7 billion, an
increase of 134,000 percent.

The big switch

Pull
back and consider the whole of human history. For perhaps 2.5 million
years, well over 99 percent of our time on Earth, we lived in small
bands or tribes, foraging and hunting for food. With baskets and tools
of stone, bone, and wood we walked the bush, blending gracefully into
Earth’s ecosystems.

Then
around 8,000 BC we began the transition to agriculture, growing and
storing our own food. That changed everything. Arguably, there have
been only two fundamentally different phases of human existence: before
and after agriculture.

Why
the switch? Why quit something which had worked for us for thousands of
millen­nia? We have only partially informed guesses. Perhaps changes in
climate made hunting less productive or the domestication of grains in
some areas more attractive. No one men­tions, though, that only a few
people had to make the initial change for it to take over the world.
Nor do many observers acknowledge that the adoption of agriculture was
not as nice for us as we’ve been led to believe.

This
cycle of growth explains how agriculture spread around the world. It
was not a matter of hunter-gatherers observing farmers and eagerly
adopting their practices. It was the spread of farmers themselves. [10]
Their ever increasing food supply meant ever more agriculturalists who
needed more land and took it, often violently.

At what cost?

Examine it closely, in fact, and agriculture emerges as a springboard for most of today’s environmental and social problems.

Yes,
it made possible civilization with its cities, jet liners, and
corporations. But at what cost? Its most immediate impact was the
elimination of all who stood in its way as farm­ing cultures spread
around the world. Part genocide and part culture killing, the process
continues today as the handful of remaining hunter-gatherers on earth
struggle for sur­vival. [2]

So how’s all that modern environmentalism

working out for us --

the green living, the carbon credits,

reduced consumption,

development in the Third World, better solar panels?

...it all seems hopelessly inadequate, even laughable

in the face of today’s global ecological crisis...

The
resulting environmental impacts of human population growth are well
known. From species loss and climate change to the global spread of
chemical toxins and the death of coral reefs, human numbers fgure as a
fundamental driver of nearly all environ­mental degradation.

Some
insist those problems are mainly the result of excessive per person
resource con­sumption. Population does multiply with per person
consumption to determine total con­sumption. But individual levels of
consumption only became a global issue as the number of consumers grew
large enough to make them so. Agriculture made it happen. It links with
human population growth to destroy the biosphere.

The sixth mass extinction

Chief
among the destructive impacts of agri­culture are today’s alarmingly
elevated extinction rates. Just as agriculture has crowded out
hunter-gatherers, it has pushed out other species. Most biologists
agree we are today in the midst of the sixth mass extinction event in
Earth’s history, the ffth having eliminated the dinosaurs. This time
one species -- our own -- is the cause.

Fossil
evidence suggests an increase in extinc­tions even before agriculture.
Anthropologist Paul S. Martin has championed the “overkill” hypoth-

With
farming came a large increase in work and a steep decline in health,
the latter discovered by archeologists examining the bones and teeth of
people living in the same regions before and after agriculture. It
brought social hierarchies, sexual inequality, fam­ine, slavery, time
clocks, money, and a massive upscaling of violence. [3] Jared Diamond
called it “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.” [4]
More recently, anthro­pologist and geneticist Spencer Wells provided
his own list of some of the costs of the shift away from hunting and
gathering: “diabetes, obesity, mental illness, climate change.” [5]

Less
publicized have been agriculture’s ecological impacts. History texts
glorify civili­zation, based on agriculture, as the pinnacle of human
existence. They don’t mention it required an end to living in harmony
with nature as contributing members of local eco­systems. Author John
Zerzan has said of agriculture, “The land itself becomes an instru­ment
of production and the planet’s species its objects.” [6]

Trying
to live apart from nature carries a price. Why don’t we take more
seriously the many peoples, such as the Maya and the Anasazi, who
adopted farming only to see their civilizations fall apart as drought,
depleted resources, or too little arable land for a grow­ing population
sent a recurring message from nature? Why don’t we hear about those who
simply walked away and returned to hunting and gathering? [7]

esis,
arguing the cause was the spread of human hunting out of Africa to
continents con­taining large mammals unaccustomed to human predators.
Other investigators such as Donald K. Grayson dispute his conclusions
and point to evidence implicating changes in climate. What we do know
is that extinction rates have accelerated greatly since the advent of
farming. [11]

A
primary cause of extinctions is habitat disruption. And what better way
to disrupt, to destroy habitat than to level a piece of land,
eliminating all life on it, then to plant a single crop exclusively for
human use. That’s agriculture, and it has spread over more than a
billion hectares of the earth. Indeed, any human-caused environmental
damage prior to agriculture pales in comparison to what has come after.

The
industrial age and our use of oil has meant yet another acceleration of
the Sixth Extinction as far more land has been put under cultivation
and the human population has skyrocketed, obliterating habitat to make
way for cities, subdivisions, shopping malls, and highway systems.

The
problem of agriculture is in part a problem of human numbers. Before
farming hu­man population size had been regulated by the same process
that works for black bears, dingos, bonobos, rainbow trout, and
long-tailed parakeets. It works for all species, gener­ally keeping
their numbers within carrying capacity. It’s simple: Population follows
food supply. Normal oscillations in available food exert multiple
small, cumulative, typically painless infuences on fertility and
mortality. With agriculture we circumvented this pro-